August 3, 2012 AT 7:53 am

Introducing the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro – Our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry PI. Adafruit loves the new Raspberry Pi 🙂 – especially how easy it is to hack circuits using the electronics breakout pins! But sadly, the latest official distro “July 15 Raspbian Wheezy” did not have many of the delicious hackables built in. That’s why we decided to roll our own distribution.

Our distro is based on “Wheezy” but comes with hardware SPI, I2C, one wire, and WiFi support for our wifi adapters. It also has some things to make overall hacking easier such sshd on startup (with key generation on first boot) and Bonjour (so you can simply ssh raspberrypi.local from any computer on the local network).

This is our first distro, Occidentalis v0.1. Rubus occidentalis is the black raspberry. It is derived from Raspbian Wheezy July 15.

We have made a few key changes to make it more hardware-hacker friendly!

4 Comments

Cool work, well done. As the RPi Foundation appears keen on merging things (reiterated with the post/talk on the Android 4 kernel) perhaps this will provide impetus to include the Adafruit goodness into the standard Wheezy build. RPi should not be afraid of larger card sizes to keep costs down as 8 and 4 GB cards cost what 4 and 2 GB cards cost just a few months ago.